a designer's thoughts on experience in the enterprise

Posts tagged "UI"

UI, UX, IA, IxD, UCD, HCI . . .

There seems to be a lot of confusion around User Experience Design, what it does, why it is important and how it is different from User Interface Design. This last point is often combined with calls for rules or SOPs to guide developers in creating good user experiences. While there are certainly guidelines and design patterns for creating digital interfaces, these are by no means prescriptive. User Experience Design is about crafting the potential for a great interaction between a user and his/her tool. This interaction, however, is highly dependent on the situation; the environment, type of user, interaction modes, visual language, and especially the user themselves. The consequence of this web of interconnected dependencies is that there are no hard and fast rules. There are, however, some concepts which all User Experience and Interaction Designers strive to achieve through the use of the visual elements and principles of design.